Going To The Getty? Hit Bathroom First

LOS ANGELES — Here is a tip on how to enjoy the hottest new cultural attraction in Los Angeles: Use the restrooms at the tram entrance before heading up to the Getty Museum.

Why? Because visitors are discovering that gaining entry to the restrooms in the museum itself involves extraordinarily long waits.

Despite 13 years of meticulous planning, the gleaming, campuslike $1 billion Getty Center opened here last December with an extraordinary wave of publicity and an even larger wave of visitors that has all but overwhelmed the facilities. In fact, the 1,200 parking spaces in the garage are booked through November. So is the restaurant.

The Friday evening concerts are sold out. The bookstore is doing four times the business it anticipated. The fire department has warned Getty officials that the museum is at capacity at popular hours and that it must spread out the crowds, by staggering admission times, so that there are no more than about 5,000 visitors at once.

So willing are residents to violate previously unassailable social standards to get to this trove of European and ancient art that people normally enslaved by their automobiles are riding public buses. Stephanie Griffin, a manager for the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, which now runs a line to the Getty Center, said that ridership had increased as much as 75 percent on the extended lines and that many new passengers were clearly on unfamiliar ground: One offered the bus driver a $50 bill to cover the 50-cent fare, and some riders have tried to use Visa cards.

The museum, part of the Getty Center's 110-acre complex of cool travertine marble, had planned on about 1.3 million visitors in its first year, a figure initially regarded as ambitious. But it is on track to receive well more than 2 million.

In other words, the most expensive cultural center built in the United States in years has opened virtually at capacity, with almost no room for expansion because of its unusual hilltop setting. The problem has meant that visitors need not just a plan for visiting the Getty, but a strategy.

``We continue to be dumbfounded at the degree to which people here and outside Los Angeles see this as a critical part of the city and come here, even at peak times,'' said Stephen Rountree, the Getty's chief operating officer.

Few problems better illustrate the busy new museum's difficulties than the long lines at what seems like the overly modest number of public restrooms. There are nine sets of restrooms at the Getty Center, only two of which are in the museum proper, with another two sets nearby, next to a cafe and a lecture hall. Compounding the problem is the fact that while museum officials had expected visitors to spend perhaps two hours at the Getty, they are actually spending four hours.

The museum consists of an entrance rotunda and five two-story pavilions connected by walkways. The now closely observed stall count in the nine sets of restrooms at the center is 44, including urinals, for men and 44 for women. The four sets of restrooms in the museum area have a total of 21 stalls each for men and women. Museum officials who collected the figures said they had never imagined this would be such a critical issue.

The problem is particularly severe for women at peak hours.

``They're nice bathrooms, for sure,'' said Joanne Hurt, a Southern California resident who was waiting to use the restroom Tuesday morning. ``But there could be a few more,'' she added, looking out over a bustling crowd. ``I mean, all these people had breakfast just a little while ago. There are four stalls in that bathroom. What were they thinking?''